Forgive me if my questions and comments seem naive; I've not yet acquired much experience using Visual Studio, though I do possess a great deal of experience building GUIs using direct calls to the WinAPI.
I am using Visual Studio's MFC Application Wizard to create the framework for a graphical user interface to a software engineering tool. The GUI is to have an MDI capability. The MFC Application Wizard successfully generates the source code for the GUI framework. The executable built includes menus, basic editing functionality, etc. Initially, I was very impressed by the wizard's capabilities. However, I was then confronted with the problem of adding the program logic needed to implement planned GUI capabilities. Modifying menus, adding toolbars, and dialog boxes was not difficult, but I found it difficult to find answers to questions like these,
o In which component should an event handler for a given menu item be added, and what sort of program logic was needed? ;
o How could I find where in the source code the application wizard had placed its event handlers for the default menus created (some seem to have been hidden from view)?;
For example, I added a menu item that could be used to select a font for text documents. It was easy enough to bring up the Font Dialog and to retrieve selections made, but which MFC classes should then be used (and how) to influence the presentation of document text. CFont seemed like a natural choice (based on name only) until I discovered there was insufficient capability built into this class to do all that needed to be done. Visual Studio's Help facility provides descriptions of its classes and their methods, which in my opinion are too terse and about as useful in building an application, as a dictionary is in writing a novel.
I have purchased and read texts, examined the sample code provided by Microsoft, and spent hours experimenting. It shouldn't be this difficult. A major failing of MFC, I believe, is that MFC class functionality is insufficiently explained and that program control for MFC applications is insufficiently apparent (too much transparency).
It now seems that there is more critical review in this than I had intended and fewer questions to be answered. Would anyone like to give advice on how I might be led to a more positive view? I guess I'll let that be my single question to you all.
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